Linford D. Fisher

Parts of the following review are from my forthcoming book The First American Founder: Roger Williams and Freedom of Conscience, copyright © 2014, all rights reserved.

For centuries, a shorthand essay of Roger Williams (ca. 1603-83), written sometime during the last few years of his life, was left undeciphered and was accordingly unavailable to historians. In a remarkable scholarly achievement, a team of professors and students recently decoded much of this essay (hereafter cited as the "lost essay"). The result is this book, which also contains appropriate scholarly commentary and related materials.

Although portions of Williams's lost essay could not be deciphered, his principal arguments emerge from the successfully translated material. Significantly, the lost essay establishes that Williams held certain views rather consistently during the last several decades of his life. The first is that "believer's baptism" (baptism of adults who were "born again") was, to Williams, the only scripturally authorized form of baptism. Moreover, Williams believed that the New Testament mandated "dipping" (the correct translation of the Greek word for "baptism") or immersion as the only proper method of baptism. The expression of these views by Williams in this late writing shows his continuing agreement with the Baptists and his opposition to the traditional baptism doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church, the Lutheran churches, and most of the Calvinist churches, including the New England Congregational churches of his time.

Williams was a religious minister, and he was instrumental in founding the first American church based on Baptist principles in 1638 or 1639. Strangely, however, he withdrew from this church, located in Williams's new settlement in Providence (Rhode Island), after a few months and never again associated with a formal church, though he continued to preach to those interested in listening to him. Given his continuing adherence to Baptist principles, a question arises as to what accounts for Williams's disassociation from the church he helped establish in Providence.

The editors of Decoding Roger Williams suggest that Williams was not—as alleged by his enemies—a "Seeker." Ibid., 20, 53n43, 53nn49-52. The question becomes, however, a semantic issue regarding how "Seeker" is defined. In an endnote, the editors observe: "If the Seekers actually existed as an organized movement, they were held to believe in universal salvation, to deny the divinity of Jesus Christ, to say that there was no heaven or hell, to believe that God dwelled within each person, who could become sinless—all ideas which Williams utterly rejected." Ibid., 53n52. It is certainly true that Williams, who was in most (but not all) respects a Calvinist, did not agree with any of these positions attributed to the Seekers, as is especially evidenced in his correspondence as well in his last treatise published during his lifetime, George Fox Digg'd out of his Burrowes . . . . (Boston, 1676).

The editors of Decoding Roger Williams also correctly observe that "[t]he one thing [Williams] shared with [the Seekers] was the view that a true visible church no longer existed and could be restored only by a new apostle commissioned by Christ." Ibid., 53n52. The editors note that, during the early 1650s, Williams sent to John Eliot (the Massachusetts Bay preacher whom Williams was opposing in his lost essay) a copy of John Jackson's A Sober Word to a Sober People: or A Moderate Discourse Respecting As well The Seekers, (so called) As The Present Churches . . . (London, 1651 (actually published in December 1650)). Decoding Roger Williams, 67n237. Jackson acknowledged being a Seeker, but he rejected the common misimpressions of what a Seeker was. Rather, he defined Seekers as "such, as, not seeing a sufficient ground for the practice of Ordinances [religious requirements] are said to seek them." A Sober Word to a Sober People, 2. In the remainder of his work, Jackson questioned the scriptural authority for the current churches and ministry. Although Williams may not have agreed with all the details of Jackson's analysis, it is clear from several of Williams's writings that he was a Seeker in Jackson's definition of the term.

Accordingly, the paradox presents itself of Roger Williams supporting the Baptist view of baptism while rejecting the scriptural authority of any current church or minister, Baptist or otherwise, to baptize. Williams himself was quite explicit in acknowledging this inconsistency in a November 10, 1649 letter to John Winthrop, Jr. (cited in Decoding Roger Williams, 20). Williams's lost essay seems to support fully the Baptist view, without (at least as far as the essay has been deciphered) any reservations about the authority of any existing church or minister to administer a scripturally appropriate baptism. Since the lost essay is Williams's last word on the subject, perhaps he had by then modified his Seeker views and finally adopted the standard Baptist position. But this conclusion is by no means certain.

The second major topic addressed in Williams's lost essay is the question of conversion of Native Americans. As the editors of Decoding Roger Williams observe, Williams seemed eager to attempt to convert the Natives to Christianity during his early years in New England. However, he then began to question, following his developing Seeker views, whether he or anyone else had apostolic authority to seek such conversions and, additionally, whether such conversions would be genuine. Williams's lost essay questions the validity of the many apparent Native conversions effected by John Eliot, the most famous Puritan missionary of that century to the Native Americans. Although Williams himself would occasionally discuss Christianity with interested Natives, he did not attempt any massive conversion of them in the manner of Eliot. The lost essay confirms Williams's turn from the early conversion enthusiasm of his youth to the more sober, cautious approach of his maturity.

The editors of Decoding Roger Williams include in their work a lengthy, well-documented essay entitled "A Key into the Language of Roger Williams: Cracking and Interpreting the Roger Williams Code." Although I do not agree with all of the interpretations in this essay, it is a valuable contribution to scholarship, including citing many relevant bibliographical sources. One remark may require some clarification. The editorial essay refers to Henry Martyn Dexter as a "Baptist historian . . . ." Decoding Roger Williams, 48n7. Considering the context of the remark, this probably means that Dexter was a historian (albeit a critical one) of the Baptist movement. The reader should not conclude, however, that Dexter was a Baptist in religion. Dexter was a Congregationalist minister and an editor of The Congregationalist. Steven R. Pointer, "Joseph Cook—Apologetics and Science," American Presbyterians 63, no. 3 (Fall 1985): 308n57, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23330556; Dexter, Congregationalism: What It Is, Whence It Is; How It Works; Why It Is Better Than Any Other Form of Church Government; and Its Consequent Demands (Boston, 1865); Dexter, A Hand-Book of Congregationalism (Boston, 1880). Far from being a Baptist, Dexter was an apologist for Massachusetts Bay's persecution of Baptists. Dexter, As to Roger Williams and His 'Banishment' from the Massachusetts Plantation with a Few Further Words concerning the Baptists, the Quakers, and Religious Liberty (Boston: Congregational Publishing Society, 1876), 105-23. Moreover, Dexter was a severe critic of Roger Williams. He wrote, for example, that Massachusetts Bay's expulsion of Williams was "solely taken in view of his seditious, defiant, and pernicious posture toward the State." Ibid., 79. Dexter's views (which disregarded indisputable historical facts) are representative of those of a long line of historians whom Brooks Adams (the great-grandson of U.S. President John Adams) aptly called "the reverend historians of the [seventeenth-century Massachusetts Bay] theocracy." Brooks Adams, The Emancipation of Massachusetts: The Dream and the Reality, rev. and expanded edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1919), 308 (referring by name to Dexter), 310.

It is a significant historical fact that the Baptists were among the principal advocates for liberty of conscience and separation of church and state during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries. During the course of the nineteenth century, however, some Baptist and other Christian leaders began to claim that the United States is a "Christian nation," demanding, for example, constitutional revision of the principles of the First Amendment Religion Clauses. But the history of the transformation of some Baptist and other Christian leaders from proponents to opponents of separation of church and state is a topic for another day. Suffice it to say for now that Roger Williams, a deeply religious minister of the Gospel, opposed, on both religious and secular grounds, the notion of any nation calling itself "Christian."
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